'Until I Find You': Adored by Women

Despite its gargantuan heft, John Irving's 11th novel moves nimbly from a standing start to warp speed. Legions of the author's admirers will still be searching for a comfortable way to accommodate the book on their laps when they find themselves hustled off on a wintry chase through Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki and Amsterdam. In late 1969, Alice Stronach, a tattoo artist in Toronto, trundles her son Jack Burns, age 4, along with her while she pursues William Burns, an Edinburgh church organist who impregnated and abandoned her nearly five years earlier. Her itinerary has its logic: Her prey yearns to play the magnificent organs of Europe and he is an "ink addict," driven to have every possible inch of his skin decorated. The cities on Alice's list boast grand churches and a flourishing tattoo trade.

Jack Burns's trip with his mother in the novel's first seven chapters reiterates the central premise of most of Irving's fiction: since all childhoods, even the most pampered, can seem scary, why not expose a fictional child to experiences -- grotesque, farcical, sexually outlandish -- that might cause even jaded adults to blanch, and then see what happens? In this case, Jack survives the louche environments of tattoo parlors, the pillowy display of prostitutes in Amsterdam's red-light district and ambiguous encounters between his mother and her male tattoo customers in various hotel rooms -- all with his innocence intact. His father has not been found, but Jack has not been lost.

Then something truly bizarre occurs. Back in Toronto, Alice and Jack settle in again with Mrs. Wicksteed, a wealthy widow who has protective feelings for unwed mothers. She is an Old Girl of St. Hilda's, an Anglican school that has just decided to admit boys to the lower grades, and Alice, with her help, gets Jack enrolled, because, she tells him, "You'll be safe with the girls."

Alice's confidence on this point rather quickly seems misplaced. At the beginning of his first day at St. Hilda's, Jack bumps into an older girl, Emma Oastler, who immediately takes an interest in his long eyelashes and then in the rest of him. As she tidies up his school uniform, re-tucking his shirt into his gray Bermuda shorts, she whispers in his ear, "Nice tushy, Jack." Emma is 12 and Jack 5 at the time, and she decides to hasten, or at least observe, his progress toward pubescence.

Almost every day after school, as this odd couple rides home in the chauffeur-driven car Emma's family sends for her or repairs to Jack's room at Mrs. Wicksteed's, a pattern develops: " 'How's the little guy,' " Emma would invariably ask, and Jack would dutifully show her. 'What are you thinking about, little guy?' Emma asked his penis once." When Jack is 8, Emma brings her mother's unlaundered bra to him as food for the little guy's thoughts, telling Jack that he can smell the offering. When he asks why, Emma says: "Just try it, baby cakes. You never know what the little guy might like." Irving's narrator adds: "Boy, was that the truth! (Too bad it would take years for Jack to find that out.)"

Around this point in the novel, some readers may experience a certain sinking sensation. Surely "Until I Find You" can't have turned into what it increasingly appears to be: a novel about Jack's little guy. (What happened to tattoos and the missing father?) There must be a reason for all those unappetizing bedroom scenes between Emma and Jack. Is he meant to be that lamentable presence in so many contemporary news stories, a sexually abused child? Irving has not been shy in the past about telling his readers what they should think -- particularly strong didactic streaks run through "The Cider House Rules" and "A Prayer for Owen Meany" -- but here he leaves the question of Jack's early sexual indoctrination murky. When she learns what Jack and Emma have been up to, Alice complains to Mrs. Oastler that Emma has "molested" her son, although she does nothing to keep the two apart. Mrs. Oastler thought "it was not possible for a woman or a girl to molest a man or a boy; whatever games Emma had played with Jack, he'd probably liked them."

What are Jack's thoughts? After he's finished the fourth grade, and St. Hilda's, he reminisces: "Jack Burns would miss those girls, those so-called older women. Even the ones who had molested him. (Sometimes especially the ones who had molested him!)" That doesn't sound like the musing of a victim.

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Jack still has three more schools to attend over the next 12 years, but St. Hilda's has fully stamped the man he will become. His participation in class dramatizations and school plays convinces him his vocation is acting. He believes, thanks to Emma and her cronies, that he can have any woman he wants just for the asking, although usually he won't have to ask. There will also always be a helpful female on hand to choose his clothes and make decisions for him.

It should be interesting to see how real life kicks the slats out from under this narcissistic lad's illusions. And it surely would have been, except that real life misses its appointment with Irving's novel. Everything Jack foresees about his future comes true, only better. Emma reappears and teaches the actor-to-be about movies: "Jack loved Fellini's 'La Strada,' which he saw (more than once) with Emma holding his penis." Other women help him continue this education: he watches Kurosawa's "Yojimbo," "an exciting film to see with a Japanese girl holding your penis in her hand!" Then, with his beautiful girlfriend Claudia, it's on to Fassbinder's "Marriage of Maria Braun," featuring Hanna Schygulla: "There are worse things than watching Hanna Schygulla while a woman holds your penis." Small wonder that Jack chooses acting in films over a career on stage. Larger wonder that he immediately becomes a movie star, thereby exponentially increasing worldwide the pool of women who adore him. Mammoth wonder that, with substantial help from Emma, he wins an Oscar in 2000 for best adapted screenplay. (An inside joke for devotees. In real life this award went to Irving for his film version of "The Cider House Rules.")

"Until I Find You" is an immensely protracted story devoid of any conflict. Nothing thwarts or baffles Jack Burns, no fateful choices test or scour his soul. Imagine a "Great Expectations" in which Pip's climb from nowhere up the gradations of snobbishness doesn't trouble his conscience, and Estella, Miss Havisham's adopted daughter, far from icily mocking and rebuffing Pip's love for her, volunteers to hold his . . . never mind.

Jack, at 32, retraces the trip he and his mother took at the novel's opening -- Copenhagen, Stockholm and so on -- when he was 4, and what he chiefly discovers is that he is just as famous everywhere else as he is in the United States. Strangers on the streets tell him they have seen all his movies and memorized his lines. (Is that what Brad Pitt hears from fans? Just wondering.) When he walks into the tattoo parlors of yore, the proprietors instantly recognize him, sometimes as Jack Burns the movie star but sometimes as the small boy who accompanied Alice Stronach into their shops many years ago. As ego trips go, Jack's is a smashing success.

Does Jack ever find his father, closing the broken circle of his past, established when his story begins? Don't expect an answer here. All of Irving's novels, including this one, are intricately plotted, and giving away his endings is a disservice to the author and his readers. Only those with the patience to tolerate Jack Burns over the long course of "Until I Find You" deserve to be in at the finish.

Paul Gray is a freelance writer who reviewed books for Time magazine from 1974 to 2001.

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A version of this review appears in print on July 17, 2005, on Page 7007001 of the National edition with the headline: Adored By Women. Today's Paper|Subscribe